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Don't trust it. The number it shows is what the system says is free memory. That is, memory unused by anything, not what is truly available for use. When you use an app that memory drops because it's used for a game. When you exit that memory is held just in case you are going back to it. Here's a test to show what I mean

Force Quitting an app doesn't change the memory but rather tells the system that it is available for use. Once the system has used up the unused memory it will then start quitting apps to free memory. If you Force Quit then that memory will be the first it uses.

The Free Memory program simply demands 100% of the devices memory but doesn't use it. It's basically a mass Force Quit.

As for the Unity Engine, it does use up quite a bit of ram. Even in the case of Monospace it is fully rendering 3d objects that are rotatable. That is going to take up a lot of ram, period. It's not a fault of the engine but rather one of the device itself. Just Force Quitting or using Free Memory is the only way it's going to be functional until Apple feels like reworking how it works

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Since 3rd party apps can't run in the background, if you just pressed the home button quickly, doesn't that terminate the app/game and free up the RAM it was using. (making a force-quit redundant)?

Click to expand...

Tapping the home button stops the game but the memory is still held. This is so that users can exit and answer a text message or check your email, while being able to return to the same point in the game.

(this is different than auto saving. Auto saving is your data being saved at the end of a level whereas auto resume is returning to the exact moment you exited)

The device assumes that you are coming back to that app and won't free up that memory unless it MUST. This is usually the case when another app demands a lot of ram so the device starts to stutter as it tries to run the app while forcibly stopping apps you exited out of.

Force quitting tells the system that you are done with that app and it can use that memory whenever it needs to.

So no it's not the same thing. BUT eventually the same results will be achieved... you will just have to deal with stutters and game crashes as a result

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Tapping the home button stops the game but the memory is still held. This is so that users can exit and answer a text message or check your email, while being able to return to the same point in the game.

Click to expand...

News to me. Apps get a termination message when you press the home button, and it's up to the devs to put in code to save the state. Once you press the button, the app is gone. Press the app icon again, and you start from scratch, then the dev's code goes and retrieves the data it stored the last time you closed it.

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It was an article talking about how every time you hit the home button the system takes a picture of the screen. That let's the system do the shrinking effect when you exit and reopen apps. They talked about how you can recover those images and depending on what was onscreen you might have important information compromised. (this is before iphones could do a full wipe)

They then talked about how memory is handled by the system. if there was 60mb free and you open an app that needs 20mb then you have 40mb free. Well if you exit the app and open an app that takes 30mb then that 30mb comes out of the 40mb. So free memory shows as 10mb (which is still true)
The system won't touch memory that was already used until an app requests more memory than is available and it has to. So theoretically (at the time of the article) someone might be able to access it, to what end they didn't say.

After beta testing apps and purposefully forcing games them to run on minimal memory it seems like it still holds true. It's nothing to do with the app but rather how the device manages it's memory.

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It was an article talking about how every time you hit the home button the system takes a picture of the screen. That let's the system do the shrinking effect when you exit and reopen apps. They talked about how you can recover those images and depending on what was onscreen you might have important information compromised. (this is before iphones could do a full wipe)

They then talked about how memory is handled by the system. if there was 60mb free and you open an app that needs 20mb then you have 40mb free. Well if you exit the app and open an app that takes 30mb then that 30mb comes out of the 40mb. So free memory shows as 10mb (which is still true)
The system won't touch memory that was already used until an app requests more memory than is available and it has to. So theoretically (at the time of the article) someone might be able to access it, to what end they didn't say.

After beta testing apps and purposefully forcing games them to run on minimal memory it seems like it still holds true. It's nothing to do with the app but rather how the device manages it's memory.

Click to expand...

Okay, I can agree with you now. Yes, it takes a screenshot. And yes, it probably leaves used memory around until it needs more. But most certainly, the closed app does not have access to the screenshot or the used memory info when it is started again. After we've processed the terminate message, the app is done. None of the code gets run after that.

Now, as to what other people do with the used memory and screenshot...who knows.